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Dessert

Bread Meringue Pudding

A pudding made from stale bread, milk, egg yolks, sugar, lemon, butter, topped with meringue and served with preserves and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Meringue Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pudding

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, mix the bread crumbs, milk, egg yolks, white sugar, lemon rind, and butter until well combined.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake until set.

Add the topping and serve

  1. Once cool, spread the pudding with acid preserves or jelly.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add the sifted sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Spread the meringue over the pudding and return it to the oven to brown quickly.

  4. Serve with cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Its dry crumb soaks up the milk and egg, giving the pudding body.
Egg yolks
They enrich the custard and help it set when baked.
Milk
It provides the liquid that the bread absorbs and that the eggs set into custard.
Egg whites
Whipped into stiff foam, they form the light meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Sifted sugar
It dissolves into the whipped whites, stabilising the meringue and sweetening the topping.

The step that matters

Baking the pudding until set. Underbaking leaves the custard loose, while overbaking makes it grainy and dry. The egg proteins set at moderate heat, so the pudding needs to be firm before the meringue goes on.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, sugar, butter, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, sugar, butter, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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